Quick study in meditation

Fidgeting Meets Its Match, If You Put Your Mind To It

January 25, 2009|BY JESSICA REAVES

You could travel the world, scouring large cities, tiny hamlets and everything in between without ever finding anyone less suited to meditation than yours truly. You see, I fidget. Incessantly. I am forever tapping a foot or twirling my hair or biting my fingernails (Yes. It's gross. I'm trying to stop). Some fathers pass down freckles or nearsightedness to their children. My dad gave me his insatiable need for movement, an unquiet that's less about expending energy and more about overactive nerves. At family gatherings, my mother, an island of calm, rolls her eyes as my father and I bounce from chair to couch to chair again, him rifling through piles of newspaper, me bouncing a pencil off my front teeth.

I'm sure it's quite annoying for her, because it's quite annoying for me, and I only have to watch one person do it.

I've never given much thought to my overactive legs and hands, probably because they feel like such a natural extension of my overactive mind. (To be clear: By "overactive," I very much do not mean "productive." It's more along the lines of overthinking. Okay, fine: obsessing.)

Here, for example, is an excerpt from this morning's internal monologue en route to the bus stop: "Did I turn off the stove this morning after I made coffee?" Yes, I did. "Am I sure?" Yes. I'm sure. "Absolutely, positively sure?" Yes, I'm . . . oh, for Pete's sake. Now I have to walk home and check.

You can see how this gets a bit tiring. And you can see, I'm sure, why the promise of meditation -- a mind at peace, if only for a moment -- would hold a certain appeal.

Happily I know Shelbi Baylor. A recent Chicago transplant, Baylor is one of the nicest people I know, and, more to the point, my acupuncturist. She learned how to meditate (or "sit") during two 10-day intensive "Vipassana" retreats, during which one is not allowed to communicate with the other students. (Questions I wish I'd asked: What if you leave the retreat bathroom with toilet paper stuck to your shoe? Or there's kale in your teeth? Still no communicating?)

These days, Baylor embraces conversation, but continues to meditate almost every day. The mother of a young, energetic daughter, she's carved out time at 5:45 a.m. When I got the gist of her routine, I knew Baylor would be an ideal first-time meditation guide: dedicated enough to wake up at an ungodly hour, and patient enough to deal with a small child -- or, I hoped, with someone with the attention span of a small child.

And so one day, mid-acupuncture treatment, I asked Baylor if she would teach me to meditate. At first she hesitated; she wasn't sure she was experienced enough in the practice to teach someone else. I told her I was sure she had far more experience than this assignment would require, given that I would probably give up after three minutes, or when my head threatened to explode from the force of pent-up fidgeting. She eventually agreed, insisting it would be more of a "sharing" experience than a class.

The morning of my session, I arrived at the acupuncture studio in a state of agitation. I had a lot of concerns: Was the goal of meditation to arrive at a state of actively not thinking? Was I supposed to think about one thing in particular, or about nothing at all? And how, exactly, was I supposed to think about nothing?

Baylor, who was arranging pillow and blankets into comfortable seating areas, did her best to talk me down. The Vipassana technique, she told me, is one of the most ancient styles of meditation. It's about seeing things as they really are, or, as Baylor put it, "perceiving reality more clearly. It helps my mind filter through what's important and what's not."

This sounded promising. But I was still worried about the whole thinking-about-nothing conundrum. "The only thing you want to concentrate on is the feeling of your breath from your nose hitting your upper lip," Baylor told me. "When thoughts come into your head, don't fight them."

Right. So as I breathed onto my upper lip, I was supposed to give in to the tsunami-style waves of doubt and anxiety? That sounded . . . not very peaceful. But, inveterate student that I am, I was willing to give it a try.

As Baylor and I sat there in the silence, our legs crossed beneath us, our hands open on our knees, a strange thing happened: I relaxed, for what felt like the first time in weeks. (I'm pretty sure that at one point, I became so relaxed I actually fell asleep, but I was so out of it that I can't really be sure what happened).

And this wasn't just a physical state of tranquility: this peace actually extended to my brain. The relentless, cyclical anxiety wasn't gone, exactly, but it had been quieted, corralled with gentle nudges to a less aggressive corner of my mind. I could manage these worries, breathe them down to size. "Oh, no. Did I remember to . . . and I'm breathing through my nose, and it's hitting my upper lip . . ."

I couldn't quite believe it when the buzzer rang at the end of the 30-minute session. I felt like I'd just sat down, but also as if I'd been resting for days. "How do you feel?" Shelbi asked, as we stretched our arms overhead and slowly got to our feet. "Really good," I said. "A bit weird, but good."

A week later -- six days and 22 hours longer than the feeling itself lasted -- I finally identified the odd sensation: I believe it's referred to as "calm."

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jreaves@tribune.com

To learn more about Vipassana Meditation, and for information about courses in Illinois, visit dhamma.org. Shelbi Baylor can be reached via her Web site: thriveacupuncture.net.